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On one of the posts above, you use a link to the IRS website of tables as your answer to where your figures came from:
Unfortunately, I couldn't find that information from those tax-tables unless I spent a day doing the calculations myself. So, I ask again, where did those figures come from? I doubt you performed the calculations yourself.
Hmm those calculations took me under 5 minutes. Here I will walk you through the process, it is VERY simple. I don't like just being fed information by biased sources like most people, I perform most of my calculations.
Next go to the first set of data: All Returns:Selected Income and Tax Items and click the year 2000, this will open up an excel file. Go to Row 49 right click your mouse and insert a new row. Now go to column D, click Auto-Sum and capture the fields that start with $200,000 in income, you will get a total of $1,700,190,574.
Now repeat the process for 2002.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MTAtech
However, even if I accept that in that narrow cherry-picked example, income may have fallen because stocks fell. But that doesn't explain what happened afterwards as stocks rebounded -- and government revenue should have rebounded too. Once again, there is no evidence that the Bush tax-cuts yielded the same revenue as before, let alone more revenue.
The overwhelming fact is that the top 1% have never done better since 1928, as the chart below illustrates:
As the CBO and others have stated, had the Bush tax-cuts never happened, the nation would have no debt now.
Actually stock values have little to do with the drop, you can look at income by source and see where the revenue came from. If you want to pin point a number once cause it was the reduction of Stock OPTION exercises due to the Dot Com bust.
Just in California alone the reduction in revenue specifically due to stock options was $12 billion using 00-02. Grey Davis took the fall for something he had no control of. In 2000 CA generated $17 Billion in revenue from stock options, they then budgeted accordingly. In 2002 they only generated $5 billion from options.
Extrapolate this out for the Fed and you see a similar pattern. It wasn't stock values that returned but income increased after 2004. Much of the additional high incomes came in the form of wages for real estate and loan workers. Often times you will find someone makes $500k one year and $80k the next but add enough of these people together and we saw overall high end income (and revenue) increase.
Using those same spreadsheets I can show you how even after the tax cuts revenue increased. On that same 2000 spreadsheet go to column P row 13, you should see total income tax of $980,496,655. Now go down to row 49 and do the same calculation as before. Those with an AGI over $200k paid $448,693,442 in income tax.
Go to any year 05-08 and the revenue is higher. In 2006 total income tax was $1,023,920,139 the tax rom those making AGI over $200k was $544,318,727.
CBO projections are notoriously far off, they are extrapolating the past to predict the future. They assumed income and revenue growth off of a bubble, not realistic natural growth. This is my point we take a series of bubbles and extrapolate them out as if they will go on forever but reality does not work that way. In just 8 years we had to bubbles pop, we can't project revenue from a system that receives most of its revenue from the highly volatile high end. California is suffering because they went from stock option dependence to real estate flipping dependence, reality does not match up with needs.
That chart is meaningless to my life. All I care about is freeing our system from the control of the privileged elite and bickering over a few percentage point increases in taxes won't fix it. You are being conned and you are falling into their game. Do you really think some Wall Street banker who gets 10s of millions in bonuses is going to be hurt when you raise taxes on someone making $400k?
Stop playing their game and start looking what what is really being done, you are just chasing false leads. You can increase taxes all you want and the same boom bust cycle will continue and the privileged elite will capture more share of the pie making the rest of us suffer even more.
Because creating jobs is not the role of private companies. The role of private companies is to make a profit for their owners, and sometimes that means keeping your powder dry while the rest of the world burns. They feel that if they can convince the American politicians to give them billions to keep them in business, and to make sure they have no competition (Who wants to start up a bank these days and compete against federally subsidized Bank of America or Citi?) , then all the better.
Ben Bernanke's answer is, more or less, "blame Congress... they make the laws, including the one that enables the Federal Reserve to do what it does. I'm just doing what they tell me to do."
And he's right, we as voters are stuck in this trickle-down, 1985 mentality of, "What's good for GM is good for America." We have not figured out 21st century finance yet.
Private businesses do create jobs thats how i made my living the role of the government is to create an atmosphere for creating business and not to bail out the failures of those that can not make it.
The problem with your 21st century finance is people do not take responsibilities for theirselves they expect free money,housing,food,handouts,tax rebates from a to z all on the taxpayers dime.You got one thing right Benny and the jet [Pelosi] blame everyone but themselves. Benny was appointed by the biggest blame maker of all time Obama...or should i say excuse maker in chief.
Because creating jobs is not the role of private companies. The role of private companies is to make a profit for their owners, and sometimes that means keeping your powder dry while the rest of the world burns. They feel that if they can convince the American politicians to give them billions to keep them in business, and to make sure they have no competition (Who wants to start up a bank these days and compete against federally subsidized Bank of America or Citi?) , then all the better.
Ben Bernanke's answer is, more or less, "blame Congress... they make the laws, including the one that enables the Federal Reserve to do what it does. I'm just doing what they tell me to do."
And he's right, we as voters are stuck in this trickle-down, 1985 mentality of, "What's good for GM is good for America." We have not figured out 21st century finance yet.
This is what you get when government bails out businesses and determines winners and losers with taxpayer funds. We should end all business bail outs and subsidies including farm aid, solar energy, etc, etc.
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It seems you need to take an elementary math class 
